A pair of real estate developers from Long Island think the Westchester housing market is ready for a modern revival of 19th-century Millionaire”™s Row in the Rivertowns, where a man”™s home was his castle ”“ in size and price and often too in name.
Partners Barry Prevor and Andrew Todd this month welcomed about 250 brokers and other guests to the launch of Greystone-on-Hudson, their luxury-homes development overlooking the Hudson River and Palisades at 612 S. Broadway, across from Lyndhurst Castle in the village of Tarrytown. The former site of Greystone Castle, the hilly, wooded, ravine-crossed 100-acre property straddles the Tarrytown boundary with the town of Greenburgh and borders the Old Croton Aqueduct trail and county parkland.
“Everything about it is supposed to feel like it was 100 years ago,” said Todd, driving past Greystone”™s new gatehouse off South Broadway and up a winding road past newly cleared lots where construction crews swarmed. “Old World charm meets the best modern conveniences of today.”
- Andrew Todd at Greystone-on-Hudson, his luxury-homes development in Tarrytown. Photo by John Golden
A Dix Hills resident who was raised in Hartsdale, Todd is the former president of Steve & Barry”™s, the retail clothing chain founded in 1985 by his development partner Prevor and a Long Island friend while Prevor was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. Starting as a campus sportswear retailer, the company grew to include about 275 stores nationwide before it declared bankruptcy in 2008. After a failed reorganization, the business was liquidated in 2009.
Todd said he and Prevor have invested in and developed properties for about 15 years. “It was more commercial at first,” he said. “Now we”™re mostly residential.” Among their several projects, they plan to build one luxury home on a 28-acre parcel in Bedford and are converting an old hotel in the Hamptons into condominiums, Todd said.
The Long Island developers in 2011 paid $6.1 million for the South Broadway estate. The seller, Esposito Equities Inc. in Peekskill, five years earlier paid $7.4 million to acquire the picturesque property from Senior Housing Associates of Westchester Inc. and planned to develop a subdivision there.
“We weren”™t planning to buy a 100-acre parcel,” Todd said. “The first time I came to look at this place, I was floored.”
The property”™s razed centerpiece, Greystone Castle, was built in 1849 by Walter S. Gurnee, a wealthy Chicago tannery owner who was elected mayor of that city soon after his 40-room hilltop mansion in Tarrytown was completed. The home had a succession of wealthy owners into the early 20th century, when its new owner, American Tobacco Co. President Robert B. Dula, renamed it Hiburton in 1909.
Todd said the mansion burned to the ground in the 1970s. In the 1940s it had been converted to a boarding school run by magazine publisher and physical fitness entrepreneur Bernarr Macfadden. The property more recently was the site of a day camp, he said.
“It had been abandoned for many years,” Todd said. “It was a complete mess.
“We basically just restored the natural beauty to what it was 100 years ago. It”™s been really a labor of love as we”™ve developed this.”
Todd said the development partnership, Greystone Mansion Group, plans to build 20 homes on lots of 2 to 5 acres. The homes, which the developer”™s own construction crew will custom-build for buyers, will be priced at $5 million to $20 million, Todd said.
- Greystone-on-Hudson”™s first completed house, 8 Carriage Trail.
Brokers and visitors can view the development”™s first completed house, 8 Carriage Trail, an approximately 20,000-square-foot home built on the site of the estate”™s former stables complex and featuring cedar-shake siding and copper materials on its exterior. Like other houses that will follow, its design and construction incorporate Manhattan schist in fireplaces and other interior and exterior areas. The stone is mined on the property, Todd said.
Among the debut Greystone home”™s interior luxuries are a workout room with exercise barre, a soundproofed theater that seats 14 people, a wine cellar, a gym with basketball court , rock-climbing wall and two locker rooms, and an 800-square-foot woman”™s dressing room and closet. The energy-efficient “smart” home has a geothermal heating and cooling system.
Modeled after a Newport, R.I. mansion, the seven-bedroom, 11-bath domicile is priced at a shade under $10 million.
Three days after it first public viewing, “We already have an offer on the house,” Todd said. He said the partners expect to complete a second home on the property in the next year.
Potential buyers at Greystone-on-Hudson? “Celebrities, entertainers, Wall Street guys, athletes, businessmen,” Todd said.
“We see the market as strong, particularly on the high end,” he said. “People have money; they took a break for a while.” And to the Greystone developer”™s potential advantage, “There”™s no new development” in the luxury market here, he said.
“If you want to pay $5 million for a home and be in a gated community, we”™re it,” he said.
“It”™s a unique place to live. It”™s different ”“ bringing back the Gilded Age.”
